'Pose' makes people cry on 'This Is Us' levels and that's lovely

In the world of entertainment, making people cry is in. One of the highest compliments anyone can give a TV show or movie is “I was sobbing by the end,” a recommendation that speaks to the show’s emotional quality and overall worthiness in the media landscape.

The current king of making people weep their sweet, wanted tears is NBC’s This Is Us, a show that is so famous for hurting feelings that people make sure they have tissues on hand before viewing, but summer TV has its own queen of the cry in FX’s Pose.

On the surface, Pose and This Is Us are wildly different. One is about the Pearson family’s wins and losses in their quest to live up to the sky-high legacy of their virtually flawless (and super dead) dad, and the other is about LGBT people of color in New York who find and forge a home for themselves in the 80’s ballroom scene. Both shows, however, rely heavily on the importance of family — blood or not — and use an ensemble cast of phenomenal actors to wring tear ducts dry with stories about joy, isolation, death, and love.

Both shows, however, rely heavily on the importance of family — blood or not — and use an ensemble cast of phenomenal actors to wring tear ducts dry with stories about joy, isolation, death, and love.

Pose and This Is Us have similar approaches to those topics, which form the bricks of human existence, but the joyful sequences on This Is Us — Kate’s wedding, Rebecca finding happiness with Miguel, Randall teaching William how to drive — are presented as the pretty moments that punctuate the lives of people who are deeply affected by a shared trauma. It is worthy, but fleeting, and often accompanied with the feeling that something else is about to happen soon, a concept best presented in “event” episodes where it’s Christmas….but Toby has a heart attack. It’s a road trip...but William won’t make the trip back home.

In Pose, joy is the endgame. When its characters find happiness wherever it is, it means they’re winning in a society that wants to see them beaten down. Joy is valuable, something to be held onto and protected, and is never treated like a pit stop on the way to a dramatic twist of the misery knife. The balls themselves are explosions of joy, and each character’s lust for a ballroom victory is echoed in their desire to feel the love and acceptance they deserve as people. It’s pretty gratifying to see them when they get it.

Those victories are of course tempered with the very real issues that face the LGBT community. Pose’s setting in the 1980s allows it to focus on the HIV/AIDS crisis that cut down thousands of people in the USA alone, and viewing the effects of the crisis is naturally heartbreaking.

But for the HIV-positive characters in Pose, the threat of death is a motivator and not a time bomb. It propels them to do more than die like the world expects (and in some ways, wants) them to, and their every action post-diagnosis is deliberate — they build a legacy for their families to follow when they’re gone and educate them as best they can before the end.

Humans crave catharsis. It’s natural to want to press a button, experience something vicariously, sob a lot, and then turn it off. Pose and This Is Us are both calibrated to give people that catharsis while also educating their watchers about the nuances of what it means to be a person. Those who like one show will probably like the other, and if the current TV landscape seems to be a little tearless these days, Pose should fix that right up.

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